“Analytic Atheism: A Cross-Culturally Weak and Fickle Phenomenon?”, 2020-01-28 (; similar):
Religious belief is a topic of long-standing interest to psychological science, but the psychology of religious disbelief is a relative newcomer. One prominently discussed model is analytic atheism, wherein analytic thinking overrides religious intuitions and instruction. Consistent with this model, performance-based measures of reliance on analytic thinking predict religious disbelief in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic) samples. However, the generality of analytic atheism remains unknown.
Drawing on a large global sample (n = 3,461) from 13 religiously, demographically, and culturally diverse societies, we find that analytic atheism is in fact quite fickle cross-culturally, only appearing robustly in aggregate analyses and in 3 individual countries.
Such complexity implies a need to revise simplistic theories of religious disbelief as primarily grounded in cognitive style. The results provide additional evidence for culture’s effects on core beliefs, highlighting the power of comparative cultural evidence to clarify core mechanisms of human psychological variation.
[Keywords: atheism, culture, dual process cognition, generalizability, religion, replicability, WEIRD people]
See Also:
“The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations”
“Intuitive Dualism and Afterlife Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Study”
“Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians”
“The etiology of stability and change in religious values and religious attendance”